Future possibilities

Today’s leaders should think creatively about the major challenges facing Houston.

On this summer Sunday morning we’re thinking of manure — horse manure, in fact. A few years ago, Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner, coauthors of “Freakonomics,” alluded to sober warnings voiced in the 1890s that New York City within a few decades would be unlivable because of the massive accumulation of droppings from the city’s 200,000 horses. One 19th-century prognosticator calculated that if the population of the city and its trusty steeds continued growing at their breakneck pace, horse droppings by 1930 would rise to Manhattan’s thirdfloor windows. The city would drown in droppings.

Of course, the Big Apple managed to avoid that odoriferous fate, thanks to Henry Ford and friends. Like New York in the early 20th century, we too may be in for surprises in the not-too-distant future — if we’re open to the possibilities.

The horse-manure problem comes to mind in the wake of yet another warning about Houston’s intractable and ever-growing traffic problem. In an article a few weeks ago about gridlock of the political variety regarding transportation issues, the Chronicle’s Dug Begley posited a Houston area where the population isn’t 6.2 million, as it is today, but 9 million, as it’s projected to be in 2035. He asked Chronicle readers to imagine that many people getting around on our current system of 18,000 lane-miles of streets and a limited transit network. Getting around, of course, would be nothing but a figure of speech if that’s where we find ourselves in the next few years.

“That risks not only our quality of life, but our prosperity in the future,” Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Center for Urban Research at Rice University, has warned.

The warning is well-taken. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that the future is now while sitting stuck in westbound Katy Freeway traffic during a weekdayafternoon rush hour. And yet surprises may be in store, surprises much bigger than the possibility of elected officials cooperating with each for the good of the community (as welcome as that would be). We need to be open to those surprises, those possibilities.

Certainly, we have to plan for the future, based on what we know now. And, certainly, we cannot expect tomorrow’s anticipated miracles to rescue us from today’s difficulties, whether global warming, mankind’s proclivity for killing or Houston’s growing traffic gridlock. But we have to make sure that our preoccupation with immediate issues doesn’t blind us to a broader view. One relatively minor example: What if the advent of selfpropelled vehicles in a couple of decades makes our traffic concerns irrelevant?

We need to fix our potholes, to be sure, as our current crop of mayoral candidates reminds us, but we also need leaders whose vision is farsighted enough to encompass future possibilities. The Center for Houston’s Future offers a few useful metaphors for that wider view: “enlarging your lens, challenging your current assumptions, encouraging you to look at the uncertainties.”

We’ve had leaders in the notso-distant past who did just that. Otherwise, we would never have had a Houston Ship Channel, an Astrodome, a Texas Medical Center. We’ve had men and women who were visionaries, who turned futuristic dreams into presentday reality.

What big dreams today could propel this community into an expansive future? That’s the question for our civic leaders, our ambitious entrepreneurs, our community-minded benefactors, our educators, our artists and writers.

It’s certainly a question for our would-be mayors. We want them to fix the potholes, but we don’t want them mired in manure. We urge them to look up and look ahead, toward tomorrow’s possibilities. We need to fix our potholes, to be sure, as our current crop of mayoral candidates reminds us, but we also need leaders whose vision is farsighted enough to encompass future possibilities.